Science By Petition -Updated

The agenda of the
Union of
Concerned Scientists
, the left-wing lobbying group that
launched the global warming alarmist letter and petition described
below, is rarely described in media accounts.
A blog post by John Fritze at USA Today
, omitted UCS' agenda,
and didn't explicitly say the petition was a UCS project. The
closest it came to that was mentioning the petition could be found
on the site. The post linked to a whitewashing tribute to Michael
"Dirty
Laundry"
Mann, whose unethical conduct was exposed in
Climategate,
penned by USA Today writer Brian Winter
. Of course, Winter's
article never mentions Mann's scientifically unethical conduct, of
which the "dirty laundry" email he penned is just one example. The
article is just another example of shameless propaganda by
environmental reporters who have downed the climate change
Kool-Aid.

And the New York Times ran
an article from Greenwire
about California's controversial
global warming legislation, AB 32, that described the Union of
Concerned Scientists only as a "nonprofit", omitting its leftist
political agenda.

It's a long and dishonest tradition for political lobbying
groups to adopt high-sounding names that disguise their true
agendas. The Union of Concerned Scientists is one of these groups.
It pretends to care about science in the service of its political
goals. Reporters are supposed to describe things the way they are,
so if they mention UCS, they should mention that it is a political
group, lest their readers be deceived.

So the climate change cheerleaders are doing what any
self-respecting political group would do: circulate a letter and
petition.

The letter, released Thursday, comes from the Union of Concerned
Scientists, a left-wing pressure group. It calls for deep cuts in
greenhouse gas emissions, and bears the signatures of about 2,000
scientists and economists. It's available
on the Web site of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
.
(Indicative of this group's role with the letter, two of its eight
references are to UCS advocacy reports).

The letter is notable for what it doesn't mention, namely, any
other potential human causes to climate change, such as the
increasingly well-known role of soot and dust deposits in melting
glaciers, especially in the Himalayas and the Arctic.

Over the last 30 years I’ve watched many glaciers shrink in
South America. It’s also happening in Europe, North America, China,
and the Himalayas. More than 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are
receding—they have no

political agenda. Science is about what is, not about what
any of us believe.

But scientific research reveals that blaming glacial melting
solely on carbon dioxide -- even assuming that human- released CO2
is causing global warming -- is flatly inaccurate.

"Our simulations showed greenhouse gases alone are not
nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt," says Menon, a
physicist and staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Environmental
Energy Technologies Division. "Most of the change in snow and ice
cover—about 90 percent—is from aerosols. Black carbon alone
contributes at least 30 percent of this sum."

The findings are significant because they point to a simple
way to make a swift impact on the snow melt. “Carbon dioxide stays
in the atmosphere for 100 years, but black carbon doesn’t stay in
the atmosphere for more than a few weeks, so the effects of
controlling black carbon are much faster,” Menon says. “If you
control black carbon now, you’re going to see an immediate
effect.”

The point bears repeating: Aerosols, fine particles suspended in
air, are not greenhouse gases. And if 90 percent of unusual melting
is caused by aerosols, and the effects of controlling them are much
faster than reducing greenhouse gases, it makes no sense to obsess
over the latter and ignore the former -- unless the motive is
political,not scientific.

No reference to this and other scientific research on aerosols
appears in the letter. It contradicts the political crusade of
global warming activists against greenhouse gases.
And
they're counting on politicians just skimming the letter and
looking at the names, and not analyzing the logic of its
content.